As the centerpiece of California’s climate strategy, the law known as AB 32 gets all the attention. But a little-known component of the state’s plan to mitigate climate change, Executive Order S-3-05, is even more ambitious. A new report from the independent California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) takes aim at its aggressive greenhouse-gas-reduction goal for 2050, and shows just how difficult it will be to reach it.

Signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in June 2005, EO S-3-05 calls for the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (a target also written into AB 32 and passed the following year), and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 — effectively a 90% per-capita decrease when population growth is factored in. The 2020 goal sounds easy enough — especially if a third of our electricity generation is renewable by then — but existing efforts, including cap-and-trade, still won’t be enough. In other words, the state has got to come up with even more reductions in the next eight years.

What happens when we project all the way out to 2050? A business-as-usual scenario would put our emissions at double the 1990 level. But the new report — coauthored by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Jeffery Greenblatt — found that with existing technologies (that means currently commercially available or in demonstration) and for “reasonable” rates and costs, we could reduce our emissions to 60% below 1990 levels. This equates to about 170 million metric tons in total emissions: a considerable achievement, but still double the 85 million-metric-ton limit established by the 80% goal.

Reducing emissions to 60% below 1990 levels hinges on continued advances in energy efficiency and widespread electrification of all energy sectors, including light-duty vehicles, trucks, buses, trains, buildings, and industrial-process heating, the researchers found. To meet our future electricity needs and still keep emissions down, a variety of energy mixes could work.

A technology-neutral “median case,” for example, posits that we could get there with roughly:

One-third natural gas

One-third nuclear

One-third renewables

Greenblatt says some zero-emissions strategies would also be needed to to keep the state’s power grid in “balance,” like batteries or voluntary reductions in electricity use, known in the industry as “demand response” programs.

That, plus aggressive deployment of biofuels to meet about half of our projected demand for fuel, is the researchers’ best guess for how California could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 170 million metric tons by 2050. And Greenblatt is fairly confident it’ll work: “It’s feasible if the state aggressively pursues the policies to make that happen,” he said.

…you’re talking about technologies that don’t yet exist.

Once you start looking at dropping that last 85 million to hit the 80% mark, however, you’re talking about technologies that don’t yet exist — or that exist only in the most theoretical sense. To reach its goal, Greenblatt said the state must, in essence, address two major challenges: 1) switching to entirely emissions-free load-balancing technologies, eliminating the use of backup natural-gas “peaker” plants; and 2) reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from fuels through advanced technologies like hydrogen fuel, carbon sequestration in biofuel development, or the use of artificial photosynthesis to produce hydrocarbons from sunlight, a cutting-edge technique being tested now at CalTech.

A self-labeled optimist, Greenblatt says this study — and the four other reports in the CCST’s “California’s Energy Future” project, plus two more to come — is a crucial first step in supporting the development of policies and technologies that California will rely on through 2050 and beyond. The CCST already has the ear of the governor’s office, the Air Resources Board, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the California Energy Commission.

“Because of the long lead times, we felt it was really important to highlight these longer-term challenges so that the state can start planning now,” Greenblatt said. “If we can show that something is possible, it’s largely up to will to make it happen.”

New pests, a shrinking water supply and rising temperatures will alter agriculture in California.

Tightening water supplies, encroaching pests and dwindling winter "chill hours," vital to many crops, are just some of the climate challenges facing California farmers.

Heat and Harvest, a new series from KQED Science and the Center for Investigative Reporting looks at the multiple climate challenges confronting California farmers. It’s no trivial matter. California’s Central Valley is widely known as “the nation’s salad bowl,” and there’s more than bragging rights at stake. Ag contributes more than $30 billion a year to the state’s economy.

Previously, Climate Watch has focused on efforts in the ag sector to conserve water or lower the carbon footprint. Some farmers are trying new technologies, others are experimenting with renewable energy. But meeting climate challenges on multiple fronts will, for some farmers and ranchers, be a matter of survival.

Here are links to some previous reporting from Climate Watch, from ag’s potential role in California’s emerging cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, to innovation on the renewable energy front and new conflicts over land use.

Planting the Seeds for Greener Farms
Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. The new bills lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of cap-and-trade permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities listed in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.

Satellites Help Save Water on California Farms
Engineers at NASA and CSU Monterey Bay are developing an online tool that can estimate how much water a farm’s field might need. Satellites orbiting the earth take high-resolution pictures which are combined with on-the-ground data from farms.

Making Renewable Energy from Farm Waste
California is just a few votes away from changing the rules to allow farmers to connect machines that create bioenergy to the electrical grid, a privilege that has thus far been reserved for farm-generated wind and solar energy.

New Map for Gardeners Won’t Help California’s Green ThumbsIt’s been more than two decades since the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zones Map, used by gardeners across the country to determine what will grow in their yards. The new GIS-enabled map unveiled this week is a boost to people who live in places that get a lot of cold weather and may be seeing slightly warmer average winters now. Despite the new level of detail in the map, gardeners in California and the Bay Area in particular, won’t learn much from it.

“If we put half over the ocean and half over land, we’d need about 0.6% of the world’s land for turbines,” Jacobson told listeners to KQED’s Forum program this week. “But all of that land, almost, is open space between the turbines, that can be used for multiple purposes, including rangeland, cropland, pasture land or just plain open space. The rest is over the water.”

Offshore turbines have several advantages over the wind farms that we’re used to seeing from the freeway. They can be mostly out of sight and earshot, for one thing, and are also likely to be a steadier source of power than most land-based “wind energy resource” areas. Looking at one area off Cape Mendocino, a Jacobson study from 2010 noted that offshore winds were “consistently fast throughout the day and night during all four seasons.”

“California has a tremendous offshore wind resource,” said Habib Dagher, who joined Jacobson and other experts on the program. Dagher, who runs the DeepCWind Consortium at the University of Maine, calculates that within 50 nautical miles of the California coast is about 587 gigawatts of untapped energy, the equivalent of more than 500 commercial nuclear power plants. The tricky part will be tapping it. The ocean depths off of California would likely require a whole new generation of turbines that ride the waves like big buoys.

In March, Dagher’s group will place an experimental floating turbine off the Maine coast. The scale-model test will offer insights into how giant six-megawatt turbines would perform offshore. He says research & development funding doesn’t support a bigger push right now, that the DOE wind research budget hovers between $70-80 million per year, “very small” compared to what much smaller countries are spending. Dagher says the U.K., for example, is aiming to get a quarter of its electricity from offshore wind farms by 2020.

Different approaches to offshore wind turbines could include "floating" turbines, which might be combined with tidal or wave energy.

“The offshore component opens up significant areas, added Dan Kammen, who heads the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley. “The marine environment is challenging and to make [those] systems work, we’re gonna need to really invest in it. The U.S. has been a bit slow in this regard.”

Dagher says that while conventional onshore wind farms are already cost-competitive with some fossil fuels, offshore development is about twice as pricey.

“These technologies, on a resource basis, are very much ready to compete,”said Kammen. “We just need to give them that shot.”

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/09/14/studies-offshore-wind-potential-is-huge/feed/1Grand Plan May Settle the Solar Siting Paradoxhttp://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/08/31/grand-plan-may-settle-the-solar-siting-paradox/
http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/08/31/grand-plan-may-settle-the-solar-siting-paradox/#commentsFri, 31 Aug 2012 17:44:30 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/?p=24076Remote deserts would seem to be the ideal place for Big Solar — were it only that simple

Can threatened tortoises and utility-scale solar plants coexist in the California desert? Since the solar rush began a few years ago, results have been discouraging. But an ambitious new plan aims to strike a long-lasting compromise. Northern Californians get a chance to weigh in on the process at a public meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, September 5.

The sprawling Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is scheduled to go online next year.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan — just call it the DRECP — is designed to establish habitat protection guidelines for dozens of species, not just the elusive desert tortoise, across an incredible 22.5 million acres of desert caught in the crossfire between conservation and clean energy.

It’s already being called the nation’s largest-ever Habitat Conservation Plan (a tool created by the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973), and the first to be framed around renewable-energy development. Habitat conservation plans work by addressing mitigation and conservation needs up front and requiring developers to pay into them — rather than the scattershot, reactionary approach employed in the desert to date.

No matter how the DRECP turns out, its implications are likely to be enormous — even beyond California, where it could set an example for other states pursuing large-scale clean-energy development in remote areas.

And yet the plan has flown quietly under the radar since the planning process began in March 2009 with a diverse, often contentious group of stakeholders. But next week at the California Energy Commission’s offices in Sacramento, members of the public can listen in and offer comment as state and local government agencies, renewable-energy developers, environmental groups, and land-use attorneys debate the ins and outs of habitat conservation on public land. The federal Bureau of Land Management owns more than 11 million acres in the California desert.

According to DRECP Director Dave Harlow, the plan relies on sophisticated, state-of-the-art species-distribution models and tools to account for a wide variety of desert plant and animal species, including 36 plants, 20 birds, ten mammals, seven amphibians and reptiles, and even four fish.

“It’s kind of our only chance for the desert at this point.”

But April Sall of Southern California environmental group The Wildlands Conservancy, one of the numerous stakeholders, is worried that everything may not come together as planned. She claims that industry representatives have been lobbying to keep land open for development, and the project’s rapid timeline — a final draft is due next spring — may not allow sufficient time to fill in knowledge gaps about habitat and species distribution in certain areas of the desert.

“I’m hopeful that this will work, but at this time I have a bit of concern,” she said. “It’s kind of our only chance for the desert at this point.”

Barbara Boyle, the Sierra Club’s senior lead for energy issues, who has also been participating in the planning process, shared Sall’s concerns. “They are moving it pretty quickly, and that makes us nervous. They are on a very fast track.”

In addition to conservation considerations, the DRECP will also help determine how many new transmission lines can be built in the California desert, Boyle said, and ultimately how much the state will rely on remote, large-scale renewable energy to meet its Renewable Portfolio Standard. “There are some really important policy choices here that are being made that are going to affect things over the long-term,” she said. “These are huge policy issues that are all wrapped up this in plan.”

A wood-burning power plant in Northern California. In 2007, "biomass" energy accounted for roughly 2.1 percent of California energy production. A new state bioenergy plan seeks to substantially increase that percentage.

Wood scraps, animal manure, household garbage and other wastes may soon fuel a sweeping “clean energy” initiative in California, if the collective vision of several state agencies comes to pass.

“Swift action on bioenergy will create jobs, increase local clean energy supplies, and help businesses grow in California,” said resources agency secretary John Laird in a Department of Natural Resources release. Currently, the bioenergy sector employs roughly 5,000 people and contributes $575 million to the state economy; the agency estimates the new plan could create an additional 4,000 jobs statewide.

The 2012 plan, a collaboration among eight agencies including the Natural Resources Agency, the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), is the latest in a string of initiatives meant to jumpstart the California bioenergy industry. In 2006, the state released its first bioenergy plan, after then-governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order requiring the state to establish:

“…targets for the use and production of biofuels and biopower and [direct] state agencies to work together to advance biomass programs in California while providing environmental protection and mitigation.”

A bioenergy source touted in the 2012 plan are so-called anaerobic digestion systems, which harness anaerobic bacteria to break down organic wastes. The California Energy Commission points to a farm in Tulare, which recaptures methane, or natural gas, released as anaerobic bacteria break down vast piles of hog manure. Enough gas is reportedly generated to drive two gas power plants that produce enough electricity for the entire farm.

Cal Fire chief Ken Pimlott sees bioenergy not only as way to diversify California’s energy portfolio but also a means to reduce the likelihood of large forest fires, such as those currently burning in the state’s northern half. “Generating energy from forest waste helps to reduce dangerous fuel loads in our forests while providing jobs and local energy supplies in forest communities,” said Pimlott in the release.

Heaps of wood along with agricultural scraps and municipal garbage can be fed into waste-to-energy or “biomass” plants. One facility highlighted in the plan is the Wheelabrator Shasta Power Plant, near Anderson, which consumes around 750 million tons of “forest residue” and wastes from local mills to generate 49 megawatts of energy. According to the California Energy Commission, at the biomass industry’s peak in the state, there were 66 biomass plants producing 800 megawatts of energy a year — roughly the generating capacity of one large gas-fired plant.

Critics say wood-burning plants may have an adverse effect on the atmosphere in the short term, since burning wood releases carbon more rapidly than under natural conditions of decay. Others assert the plants are really a veiled push for increased logging and, in the long-run, may end up competing for harvested wood used for construction or paper manufacturing.

“You can cut the smoke with a knife in the northern Sierra right now,” Meacher told me as he drove from the front lines of one of the large fires burning in his county. “I would submit that by the time these fires burning in northern California are out, it will negate all that we are trying to do under AB 32 for the calendar year.”

Last year brought a fresh breeze for wind energy, and projections indicate that 2012 will be even better. But over the next two years, a variety of forces could conspire to hamper wind energy development across the United States, despite a significant decline in the cost. These are the main findings of a new report by the US Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

It’s that classic good news-bad news scenario: should proponents focus on the fact that in 2011 wind energy became cheaper, more efficient, and more widely distributed than ever? Or should they dwell on the looming challenges, including steep competition from cheap natural gas, inadequate high-voltage transmission in many parts of the country, and the possible expiration of federal incentives at the end of the year?

A little of both, say study authors Ryan Wiser and Mark Bolinger. That’s particularly true in California, where mixed signals abound. On the bright side, the state wind industry had its best year ever and outpaced all others in 2011, adding 921 megawatts of new production throughout Northern and Southern California. Illinois came in second with 692 megawatts and Iowa in third with 647. All told, the nation added 6,816 megawatts of new production, bringing its total at the end of 2011 to a little more than three percent of the nation’s electricity supply.

On the flip-side of the coin in California, wind-energy costs are higher here than in any other state. This is largely due to permitting and siting costs, driven upward by stricter environmental controls. But it can also be attributed to the finer workings of California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which calls on large utilities to purchase a third of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Many wind-energy developers offer electricity to utilities at a higher price than they otherwise would because they know they can get away with it, said Bolinger. The end result is that in California, wind energy is much less competitive with natural gas than it is in other states, particularly in the Midwest.

“Natural gas prices have come down, pushing wholesale prices down, but wind has followed along,” says Bolinger. Nationwide, new wind contracts in 2011 averaged about 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour — rivaling all-time lows set in 2003 — while in California the average was nearly triple that.

“The incentive is to wait until the incentive comes back.”

Looking forward, Bolinger and Wiser expect 2012 to go down as another banner year. But with federal incentives set to expire on December 31, the coming year doesn’t look so rosy. It’s not simply because the incentives could end — after all, Bolinger notes, wind prices are cheap enough in some parts of the country to be competitive even without them — but because of the sheer uncertainty. “The incentive is to wait until the incentive comes back,” he said. “If there’s a chance, why not wait? If it was definitely gone, then they’d proceed.”

In other words, if developers knew for certain they weren’t getting any help, they’d go ahead and build. But since there’s a chance they’ll be offered financial assistance if they hold out a little longer, they’d rather wait and see. Expect that dynamic to dictate wind-energy development nationwide as we round the corner into 2013.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/08/20/fast-lane-for-california-wind-energy-but-for-how-long/feed/1Renters in California May Gain Access to More Renewable Energyhttp://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/08/16/renters-in-california-may-gain-access-to-more-renewable-energy/
http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/08/16/renters-in-california-may-gain-access-to-more-renewable-energy/#commentsFri, 17 Aug 2012 05:29:23 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/?p=23826Proposed legislation would make renewable energy available to millions more Californians

Most Californians can't install rooftop solar panels.

California’s big utilities are working toward the goal of generating 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, but some people want more renewable power, sooner. And there’s a solution to that: generate your own. But for most Californians — those who rent, who live in condos, whose property isn’t suitable for solar or wind installations or who just can’t afford it — that solution isn’t really an option.

Senator Lois Wolk, from Davis, has written legislation with a new solution. If Senate Bill 843 passes, customers of one of California’s big three investor-owned utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison or San Diego Gas and Electric, would be allowed to purchase renewable energy directly from small, independent producers. Those producers send energy into the grid, then customers get credits on their regular utility bills.

These offsite facilities could take a range of forms, solar arrays over parking lots, small wind installations or bio-gas facilities, but they can generate no more than 20 megawatts each (a typical nuclear plant puts out 50 times that much). And the total amount of energy generated in the state through the program can’t exceed two gigawatts, equivalent to about two nuclear plants. So in size and scale, they fall somewhere in between household-by-household rooftop solar and the giant installations being built in some parts of the state.

“They’re pooling the community resources in order to create an economy of scale, if you will, offsite,” Wolk said. “Schools or cities could do it, churches could do it, renters could do it. They could buy in to one of these facilities and receive a credit on their bill.”

The utilities aren’t united in their opinions on the program. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric have opposed it. Denny Boyles from PG&E said a concern for his company is how the program would affect utility customers who don’t participate in it.

“In an effort to increase renewables, you could drive up the costs for everyone else,” he said.

For example, the cost of building and maintaining transmission lines. But backers of the bill emphasize that those costs are built into the program, and non-participants won’t shoulder any extra burden.

San Diego Gas and Electric not only supports the bill, but spokesman Erin Koch said it’s an idea the utility had already considered.

“San Diego Gas and Electric strongly supports the concept of community solar, and we think there’s a way to make this work,” he said.

The legislation passed out of the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Thursday, and now goes on to the Assembly floor. If it passes, the new program would go into effect January 1, 2013.

One of California’s two nuclear power plants remains offline amid roiling speculation about its future. At a geothermal energy conference in Sacramento this week, the head of California’s Independent Energy Producers association put the odds of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) “ever” coming back online at 50/50.

A "flash steam" geothermal plant in East Mesa. Geothermal plants tap the heat energy underground to produce steam for electricity.

The odds matter because nuclear plants provide so-called “baseload” power, which is to say that they produce electricity 24/7 — when they’re on. Geothermal power — tapping energy from underground sources of heat — also has the virtue of being baseload. While geothermal plants can lose potency during the hottest part of the day, they don’t stop producing completely. Solar and wind are considered “intermittent” sources as they’re at the mercy of the sun shining and wind blowing.

At this week’s meeting of the Geothermal Energy Association, there was visible consternation over geothermal being the odd man out in California’s race for renewables, even though the Golden State is endowed with the most geothermal capacity in the nation.

“There’s no question that the geothermal industry is stalled in California,” lamented Karl Gawell, GEA’s executive director. The question of the day was how to turn that around. Several speakers suggested that geothermal developers seize on the current uncertainties around California’s nuclear future as an opening to tout the advantages of geothermal’s always-on potential. Obstacles include a potential dearth of transmission lines to carry power from typically remote geothermal sites and technicalities in state policies that tend to favor wind and solar development. By contrast, geothermal development is surging ahead in Nevada.

Money is another potential stumbling block. Geothermal requires drilling deep wells at upwards of $5 million per. Californians currently get about five percent of their electricity from geothermal sites. But that’s changing rapidly and the state is on track to get the lion’s share of renewable energy from the sun and the breeze. The reliance on intermittent sources for all that power has more than a few insiders worried.

“When we look at the 2016-17 time frame and see thousands more megawatts of [intermittent sources] coming online…our eyes get really big,” said Karen Edson, a vice president at California’s Indpendent System Operator (CAISO), the switchyard for electricity throughout the state. “We’re very worried about that.”

“The more [renewables] we put on the system, the more it matters how it all fits together.”

Mixing more intermittent sources into the state’s energy mix makes “load balancing” a trickier proposition for grid managers. As energy guru V. John White of the Center for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Technologies put it, “The more [renewables] we put on the system, the more it matters how it all fits together.”

Geothermal has its detractors. UC Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller, author of Energy for Future Presidents, insists that it will never be cheap enough to compete.

“Compare geothermal to solar,” Muller told me in a recent interview. “The energy coming from below is three thousand times smaller than the energy coming from solar. I mean, it’s as competitive as solar if you can make it three thousand times cheaper.”

Still, there’s a lot of potential juice down there. Government reports estimate that with the right technology, drillers could recover power equivalent to more than half the nation’s current installed base.

“The biggest risk right up front is finding the resource,” says Doug Hollett, at the federal Department of Energy. Hollet says his Geothermal Technology Program is aggressively seeking “game-changing” advances that will lower the financial risks by speeding up the drilling process or underground imaging techniques to identify where the “hot rocks” are.

But geothermal won’t provide an immediate answer for San Diego. Edson describes San Onofre as, “a bit of an odd beast,” serving an area that’s relatively isolated in terms of electrical power. “It’s not something that increased imports can solve.” The plant’s operators are currently filling the power gap by ramping up the half-century-old gas-fired plant at Huntington Beach. But getting adequate renewable energy in to replace the lost low-carbon electrons from the nuclear plant, officials admit, will be a challenge.

Stanford scientists Mike Toney and Johanna Nelson inspect a transmission X-ray microscope, a powerful device that takes nano-scale images of chemical reactions in batteries while they are running.

Imagine if Tesla, Nissan and GM could cut the price of their electric cars by 25%. That electric dream may be a wee bit closer than you think, thanks to researchers at Stanford University.

Recently a team from Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratoryannounced a new method to analyze and potentially improve rechargeable battery technology in a radical way. A cheap, reliable rechargeable battery is the holy grail for electric carmakers that rely on costly lithium ion batteries for power. Instead of the usual pairing of a lithium compound with graphite, the study examined lithium-sulfur batteries, which in theory can store five times more energy at a significantly lower cost.

“Sulfur is an earth-abundant element and offers the greatest potential to reduce cost,” said research co-author Michael Toney, head of the Materials Sciences Division at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.

The affordability factor has long been a challenge for climate-conscious carmakers who want to fuel their vehicles with oil-free energy. Batteries can cost as much as half of the electric vehicles they power, so significant cost reductions in battery production could potentially make electric cars cheap enough to gain mass market appeal.

The study used high-power X-ray imaging to analyze what happens inside a lithium-sulfur battery when the battery is running. To date, such batteries have had short life spans, failing after only a few dozen charges and discharges. This made them unsuitable for powering electric cars, which require thousands of cycles over their lifetime.

In previous experiments, this short lifespan was attributed to the chemical reactions that were thought to deplete a key part of the battery known as the sulfur cathode. But the new analysis by the study’s co-author, Johanna Nelson found “only negligible changes in the size of (sulfur) particles.”

These detailed images help researchers understand exactly what happens when the battery material swells and cracks, ultimately leading to failure. Solutions such as “encapsulating” the sulfur in a carbon shell can then be explored. In the future, Michael Toney anticipates that three-dimensional images, X-ray diffraction and X-ray spectroscopies will offer even greater insights and other ways to improve the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries.

Sion Power, the Arizona based company, is already working on a lithium-sulfur battery in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and received funding from the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). Earlier this year, BASF, the German chemical company invested $50 Million in the company.

But it’s still a long road from the lab to cheap batteries and affordable electric cars. To put this in context, Silicon Valley’s Envia Systems got worldwide kudos for its recent breakthrough in energy density testing for an advanced lithium-ion battery, but safety and lengthy life cycle testing is still ongoing.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland are researching the rather incredible lithium air battery, using gold electrodes. Other multinationals like IBM, Panasonic, LG Chem are also working on new battery technology, but that game-changing breakthrough has proved elusive so far.

Meanwhile, every electric car maker will be paying close attention and willing the researchers to put their pedals to the “right” metal and make a commercially viable and cheap battery sometime soon. Like tomorrow…

Much has been made lately of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller’s recent “conversion” to the position that global warming is both happening and stoked by human activity.* But it turns out that the controversial scientist and author has been playing catch-up.

In a statewide survey released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), 60% of Californians polled said that the effects of global warming have already begun. Asking the question in a slightly different way, both the Brookings Institution and the Pew Center for People & the Press found that in 2011, 60% and 63% of Americans, respectively, believed that there was solid evidence that global warming is happening.

Californians took it a step further, however, with nearly three-in-four of the 2,500 participants responding that government should take steps to “counter the effects of global warming right away.” PPIC conducted the survey in July and it includes responses in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.

Interestingly, Californians’ acceptance of mainstream climate science has flagged slightly from its peak from 2006-2008 — about 65%. LIkewise for opinions about the need for immediate climate action, with 80% of people responding, “yes, right away” in 2008. That enthusiasm waned some over the next several years, as Al Gore’s groundbreaking warming documentary faded in memory and critics launched high-profile attacks on the science. The Brookings study indicates that people often connect global warming to the experience of warmer weather, so it may have helped that a severe heat wave has made national headlines this summer.

Californians for the most part favor policies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seven -out-of-ten respondents say they support AB 32, California’s law requiring the state to reduce its warming emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. And they support California’s tendency to go it alone, passing stricter regulations and laws than the national standards.

…a whopping 57% had never heard of cap-and-trade…

But don’t ask for too many details as a whopping 57% had never heard of cap-and-trade, the system of emission permits that can be bought and sold between companies. It’s the centerpiece of California’s strategy to comply with AB 32 and companies will begin trading permits in November. To be fair to the survey participants, once the policy was spelled out in the question, more than half the respondents said they favored cap-and-trade.

Let’s recap: for the most part Californians believe global warming is happening now, and something should be done about it now, including policies that would force emissions down. Some of the things favored include requiring greater energy efficiency in buildings, higher fuel economy standards in cars and trucks, and encouraging city planners to change land use and transportation strategies in order to reduce the number of cars on the road. The responses to questions about energy production, however, are a bit more mixed.

Nuclear power plants like this one at Diablo Canyon have fallen out of favor with Californians since the nuclear disaster in Japan. (Craig Miller/KQED)

Respondents were exactly split 48%-48% on whether to allow more oil drilling off the coast of California, and 63% oppose building more nuclear power plants. That number has gone up since the disastrous tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in March of 2011. Californians are also divided on “fracking,” the controversial process used to extract oil and natural gas from rock formations. Of those familiar with the term, slightly more oppose using the method in California (46-42%). Variations on the technique have been used for years in California’s oil patch. The current debate centers on using the method to wring natural gas out of shale formations.

On the question of renewable energy, Californians overwhelmingly favor of more federal funding to develop wind, solar and hydrogen technology, despite varying reports on the nation’s commitment to renewable energy.